The Small Business PPC Art of War

It’s no big secret: PPC is competitive. And any advantage you can get is always an edge. The hardest part is finding the edge you can leverage effectively, efficiently, and strike a resonating blow. It sounds like war because it is. Pay-Per-Click generals need to find and exploit the weaknesses of competition.

Small businesses face a number of challenges in the PPC battleground, chief among them being that they have small-ish/smaller budgets than their larger counterparts. Meaning, for highly competitive and general keywords within your vertical, it’s difficult to compete. As such, brute force click-bids are impossible leverage because your competition will effectively price you out. Therefore, small businesses must leverage the one strength that a majority of them possess: small guerrilla marketing.

Exploiting the Competitor’s Strategy: Research

You know what your business-centric keywords are. You dredged your analytics for the keywords driving traffic and conversions. You’ve got your negative keywords in place to guard against unqualified click traffic. Whatever words you’ve found, you can bet your competitors found too. Here’s where your research skills come in.

Who Your Competition Really Is

Take a handful of keywords you’ve found and search them. You’ll be looking at company names you’ve never heard of before. That’s your market share competition now; those are companies you need to research and create a PPC strategy around.

To keep trying to outmaneuver Company X because for years it has always been Company X eating up market share, is to waste your online marketing effort and money. Your competitors are those that are competing for your keywords.

Tools to Find Your Competitors’ Mid-Tail and Long-Tail Keywords

Now that you’ve isolated the top competitors for each of your keywords, it’s time to find out what other keywords they bid on. And what they don’t. Drop in your competitor’s URLs and/or keywords and get tons of valuable information. From ads to ad spend trend lines to a fairly complete list of keywords each competitor is paying for.

You can find out where you overlap in keywords, especially on larger terms, but more importantly, you can find out what keywords they’re NOT buying. You can adjust your strategy to take advantage and leverage the mid-tail and long-tail keywords your competition may be under-bidding and/or ignoring all together. Additionally, you can adjust your strategy to hone in on the more general keywords you can’t live without.

Your Secret Weapon: Hubris

Fortunately for you, most businesses have a major chink in their armor: hubris. It’s something most businesses never protect because their egos won’t let them, or they haven’t actually thought about it: their brand name.

You can create a competitor campaign that targets the competitors’ brand name. The objective with this type of campaign is simply to draft traffic away and conversions from brands when users/consumers search them and to simultaneously create brand recognition. “18.1% – 28.5% of searchers looked for brand names…only when consumers are close to making a final purchase decision that they enter brand names into search engines.” [Jim Hedger, “Consumers Search Before Buying”]

Since there are no viable competitors, in the examples above, on these brand name keywords, the clicks will be inexpensive with possibility of a huge payoff (it might not be a bad idea to guard your own brand name while you’re at it). At one of the most crucial times in the consumer purchase funnel you have the opportunity to help change their minds and move them in a different direction. And, even if you don’t persuade them, you’ve given yourself brand recognition and the consumer an alternative if they don’t find what they need.

Anthony – you point to a tactic that most small business owners don’t know they can do – and just as importantly you’re right on target in letting people know they have to see who they’re really competing against. It’s something I run into all the time in educating my small biz clients.

Glad you liked the article and I really do hope it helps you target your PPC competition better.

Alan:

Outside of the Brand Name targeting tactic, which I’ve seen good results for recently and in the past, a lot of small business owners have a very difficult time grasping the concept of competition outside a particular region or state they have geo-physical market share in. So, more than anything, I thought this post should really accentuate the importance of finding the “online” competition. I couldn’t agree with your comment more. Thanks for the read and see you around the inter-tubes.

Jenny:

You’re most welcome. Glad the post helped, hopefully, sort a few things out for you. Good luck with the site!

I guess that you guys forgot about SEMRush. Pretty good service, all in all. May be really useful, besides it is cheaper than all that i used before and thats important for my little business.

http://themilwaukeeseo.com Anthony Verre

Trevor,

I do like SEMRush and use it frequently. But, the data is archived and not refreshed nearly as often as the others listed above. SEMRush is great for lots of comprehensive data, and it is a bit cheaper, but you if current data on organic and paid search is important for competitive research, and what you need to get the edge, then I would most certainly recommend the others listed above.